Hilary's Desk

So said Dr Glenn D Braunstein, M.D., today, in Huffington Post while lamenting the fact that every year, one in 20 people are infected by staff, and 98,000 Americans die, because the medical profession still don't wash their hands. Dr Braunstein is unusual, in that he's speaking out. (Either that, or ... he's naive.) He rolled out the usual stories of Semmelweis, and also explains why official statistics are a gross under-estimate. Then of course, there is the thorny figure he doesn't discuss for deaths from preventable medical error (sorry "system's error - and that 2008 figure is out of date) and another death roll call from prescription drugs which beats that from heroin and cocaine combined. Add these three figures together - the annual death figure courtesy of the medical profession, explodes way beyond 300,000 deaths per year, just for USA alone. What is the total world wide?

Just remember that these are the same people who call parents who don't vaccinate their kids, "scientific terrorists" and are trying to take away the rights of parents to say no to vaccines on the basis that unvaccinated children are the biggest threat to mankind on the face of the earth.

Dr Mendelsohn used to jokingly say that if the medical profession was closed down for a few months most undertakers would go into receivership. I used to think he was joking, but ... maybe not.

So how is it that the average person actually thinks that hospitals are healthy places to be?

In November 1981, I lowered my butt into a salt sitz bath prepared by a nurse, and sat there staring at one inch of dust on open copper pipes through holes in the bathroom wall. I glanced around and everywhere I looked, dirt abounded. Just as the nurse came to help up up out of the sitz bath she screamed as a large cockroach scuttled across the floor. "I'm not as concerned about the cockroaches, as I am about the rat droppings in the corner", I murmured.

Every day, I watched as the nurses tossed bloody sheets, towels, face flannels and a varied assortment of "linen" into large bags to be sent to the laundry, and wondered, were they sorted into special machines? What happened to all those sheets from patients know to have MRSA? Where did that sheet, that was just put on your child's hospital bed,... come from? How do you know it's sterile? And why was that stethoscope so blithly around the doctor's neck, so casually shoved down one shirt, and then down the next, with no thought of cross-infection?

How was it that these medics considered anything to do with them, ... automatically cleaned? With what? Ritual dogma?

In 1997 while watching our son in Middlemore for a week, nothing had changed. Cleaning staff's idea of doing a job was still a cursory whistle around the room, and I can't blame them for wanting to get out faster than they came in. Slide your finger along the shelves - and the sink - don't be surprised at the result. Look upwards at the vents which lead into the ceiling. Have a good look at the mattresses and the springs under the bed.

One of the worst rooms I saw photographic evidence for in the last two years, was an isolation room in Starship. Even there, medical staff still don't wash their hands between every patient, and I would still love to test all those "white" coats - their ubiquitous symbol of "purity"......

I could go on, but surely, anyone with half a brain can see - with their own eyes - without being given mortality stats by a doctor - that the most dangerous and unsanitary places you could possible be in, are hospitals, and doctors' surgeries - anywhere where sick and injured people mingle and the vaccinated staff think that they are bulletproof, while considering the unvaccinated, "typhoid marys" to be eliminated.....

And surely anyone with half a brain can see the hypocrisy of this same group of people pointing the finger at the unvaccinated.

(PS. A small consolation for you. I have it on good authority, that two years ago, in Auckland hospital in the ECMO room, you could eat off the floor no problem.)